France’s Yellow Vests Confront Macron With a New Reality

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For five weeks, demonstrators have marched in Paris and beyond, staging a nationwide rebellion against President Emmanuel Macron. We went to the French countryside, where the movement began, to find out whether the leaderless campaign could win longstanding changes.CreditCreditJean-Philippe Ksiazek/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

PARIS — Emmanuel Macron’s presidency was battling a crisis less than two weeks ago, blindsided by the gathering strength and fury of the “Yellow Vests” protests sweeping the country. On the streets of Paris, demonstrators shouted for Mr. Macron’s resignation or denounced him as an arrogant president of the rich.

Now, after last weekend’s protests turned out to be smaller and more restrained — partly because of quick economic relief promised by Mr. Macron, as well as a shift in the national mood following a terror attack in Strasbourg — he seems to have gotten a reprieve. The survival of his presidency may no longer be at stake, but its shape and direction seem certain to change.

He was elected in 2017 in part on his promise to bring a revolution to France — in the economy, in the job market, in France’s social welfare model. He has already confronted unions, rewritten labor laws and cut taxes for companies and the rich, in the name of spurring economic growth.

But even if the ultimate impact of the Yellow Vests is hard to foresee, the movement already has forced Mr. Macron to backtrack on some tax increases and move to put more money in the pockets of the poorest workers. It also will force him to rethink his upcoming proposals to change laws on pensions and unemployment, politicians, pollsters and economists said.

“The consequence is that there is a before the Yellow Vests and an after, and he cannot continue his reforms at the speed of a TGV,” said Bruno Cautrés, a political scientist at the university Sciences Po, referring to France’s 200-plus-mile-per-hour trains.

“He will have to change not only his approach but the content,” predicted Mr. Cautrés, who like many others say that the Yellow Vests movement is fueled by mix of financial inequality, failures in France’s electoral system and frustration from a sense of being unheard.

Taking to the streets and the highway entrances to towns and villages, and the free-for-all space of the internet, the Yellow Vests describe to anyone who will listen their sense that France’s leaders are ignoring them. They take their name from the florescent jackets that motorists are required to keep in their vehicles for emergencies.

Many mayors and other elected officials who have begun reaching out to local Yellow Vest members say Mr. Macron has little choice but to accept the project of trying to respond to the movement.

They say that the emergence of the Yellow Vests reflects enduring problems in the French system — economic and political — but also say Mr. Macron has himself to blame.

He came to the presidency without ever having been elected to political office. But rather than recognizing that he lacked an ear to the ground, critics say, Mr. Macron eschewed meetings with mayors and elected officials and refused offers by unions to work with him.

Instead he surrounded himself with advisers who may have been smart but shared a naïveté about the changes that real people could accept.

Mr. Macron did little to help himself in that regard, said Jérôme Fourquet, the head of opinion polling at IFOP, a polling firm. “The politics that he carried out, ending the tax on large fortunes, diminishing the housing subsidy, and going ahead with a hike in the fuel tax combined with some of his comments, like ‘to find a job you just have to cross the street,’ all of this focused the criticisms on him,” he said.

“But in part it was unjustified because it was an accumulation of anger that built up over a long time, “ he added.

Richard Ramos, a member of Parliament from Loiret in central France, where he still serves as a city council member, generally supports Mr. Macron. But like many mayors, he said that Mr. Macron had erred by not listening to local politicians before he moved ahead with his economic plans and his cancellation of a surtax paid by France’s wealthiest people.

Mr. Ramos said most Yellow Vests members he had encountered are wage earners or small business owners who want to pay their employees more but cannot afford to.

He gathered a group of local Yellow Vests members together at a local restaurant over a bowl of soup last week to watch the president’s nationally televised speech that promised relief to the protesters. Some said they could see the president had understood their message, but others were not satisfied.

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President Emmanuel Macron of France prepares to lay a wreath at a memorial for those killed in an attack on a Christmas market in Strasbourg.CreditPool photo by Jean-Francois Badias

“This crisis of confidence cannot be resolved with a 13-minute speech by the president,” Mr. Ramos said.

“But what makes it complicated is that the Yellow Vests do not recognize us any more as representatives of the nation,” he added. “They say to us, ‘You don’t listen to us.’ So before we can even talk, we have to renew their confidence.”

Everyone seems to have advice now for the president: on his personal style, on how to make citizens feel like he is hearing them, on how to formulate policy.

“You cannot do a project, build something without sharing it, creating it with the people who live there,’’ said Joséphine Kollmannsberger, the mayor of the small town of Plaisir, who was among a group of mayors who met with Mr. Macron this month. “And I think the president has to function like that with the French people, otherwise he’s not going to pull through.’’

Some people are reminding Mr. Macron that although he won the election, in some respects he does not represent the majority.

Mr. Cautrés, the political scientist, sees Mr. Macron’s election as a paradox of French democracy, in which legitimately elected politicians may not necessarily enjoy majority support.

In France, presidential candidates compete in two rounds of voting, and the top two vote getters in the first ballot face each other in a runoff. In the first round Mr. Macron won 24 percent of the vote, primarily from people who really believed in his reforms, but in the second round, when he was up against the far-right Marine Le Pen, he got 66 percent.

However, many voters among his second-round supporters were casting ballots against Ms. Le Pen, not for Mr. Macron and his agenda. That made his mandate for an overhaul shallow at best. He zoomed ahead anyway.

“He said ‘revolution’, but many people did not agree,” Mr. Cautrés said.

So now pressure on him has intensified to change both his style and the content of his proposals. Otherwise, political pollsters and local politicians say, larger protests likely loom, with a reproach at the ballot box that risks sending the far right to power.

A poll released Sunday by IFOP for the Journal Du Dimanche found that if the first round of the election held in 2017 were held today, Mr. Macron would do slightly better than he had then, but that Ms. Le Pen would do significantly better, pulling ahead of Mr. Macron in the first round, and that the two would again face a runoff.

Although Mr. Macron announced tax breaks and spending in his Dec. 10 speech to help the poorest workers and those on fixed incomes, and already had halted a planned increase in the fuel tax, he has not backtracked on his most consequential reform to date: an overhaul of the labor code. Nor has he retreated on the package of tax changes that included eliminating a tax paid by the very wealthy.

The left has berated him for failing to reinstate the wealth tax while the right has taken comfort in his standing firm on the changes he already has made.

However, Mr. Macron came to office proposing a half dozen major reforms. The ones he has yet to make will be the ones most affected by the Yellow Vests upheaval. They include an overhaul of the unemployment insurance system and of social security payments, and a downsizing of government.

For Philippe Aghion, an economist who worked with Mr. Macron during the campaign and who teaches at Sciences Po, the problem is that reforming the labor market, which injects uncertainties into people’s lives, should not be done without helping the middle class and working poor.

“They liberalized the labor market, but they did not put the social protections in place at the same time,” said Mr. Aghion, who believes when governments undertake structural changes to the economy, they must help people through them.

Now Mr. Macron must do more to prove that he has the concerns of the Yellow Vests in mind, Mr. Aghion said. He said the president should be more generous on unemployment insurance, for example, and ignore advisers who are telling him to decrease it over time.

The Yellow Vests are not going away.

Pierre-Étienne Billot, 40, who was protesting with the Yellow Vests in Paris last weekend, said that for Mr. Macron the Yellow Vests were “a bit like head lice” that require multiple treatments.

“One day they will come back,” Mr. Billot said. “He will not be able to get rid of them.”

Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: Yellow Vests, Fueled by Discontent, Confront Macron With a New Reality. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe